Monday, October 26, 2015

Beauty Calls

What Stories Lie Under

1. - I remember we made love standing
on the highest mount,where the Romans conquered Seleucia,
renaming the town Zeugma,
which means “bridge” or “crossing”
in ancient Greek. It also means to yoke;
a bond, a band; to join; a term of
wordplay, when we say: She brokehis car and his heart, that's a zeugma,
or pussies that swallow milk and kisses,
and penises are a zeugma, too,
we use them to join to one another,
bridges with ridges we fuse on to tightly,
although fearing we'll come unstuck
by its highly unreliable glue;
and as I lay in you, I thought
about the archaeology of our bodies,
the digging we do, the excavating
of the old in the new; and I wondered

2. -Who cut the grooves
into the stone streets, which once held pipes thatdelivered water to Zeugma? Through the mouthsof bronze lions, who touched, who drank, whose lipswere watered on sunny days, courtyards ablaze circulatingthe fresh air outside, as children laughedby mosaics of
Eros riding a dolphin;Danae and Perseus being rescued by fishermenon the shores of Seriphos; Poseidon, the god of the sea watching benevolently,who fucked who, or who made love through the milkyhue of sky, who was conceived in bedrooms and who in fields of gloom,who hurt, who laughed, who cried with joy,who featured who in lovers’ stories,whispering of Eros and Telete,hands touching the secret that our hands touched now,
when you cupped my face, and brought me back down
to our bodies in the ground.

3. - And I remember how I met you, in the
days after completing my military training.
I'd wanted to wash the sundried sandout of my throat, drink some good whiskyand watch the streets of Istanbulstroll nonchalantly by. A good wayas any to kick the armyout of oneself, I thought;full as I was with a monthfulof sweaty, hairy, snoring brothers breathing the same air, which could only be detoxified by a seat at some Istanbul cafe on the promenade, ladies swinging their hipsto the call of some drummen feel but can't hear:Beauty calls to behold with starving eyes;

4. - And it was there, in the ruins that now stand,
where I met the proprietor of the coffee house,
a poet who wrote odes to his love,mourning his time in the armywhere he lost seventy of his poems;and there where I met you, too, a Greek girltalking of Turkish legends only a few know,and suddenly we had hushed our tonesto inaudible decibels,and we found ourselves travelling to Zeugma,where most of the western bankof the ancient town now sitsdeep in water and the city’s eastern bankis completely submerged, but it'sa misnomer-- as we were-- for there is much leftto see in Zeugma, and wonder,what stories lie above, and what under;
as foot hits dust, and the step
of yours replaces the one of long ago.

In Soil Unseen

The old city on the Euphrates flood plain, Apamea,
was the first to go. Only excavations continue
to tell the story of an ancient city at the crossroads between east and west, slowly drowned in a narrative
of water, on streets where once blood madder flowed
redder than a robin's breast. One of Alexander
the Great's lovers, a war commander founded this place,
a Greek boy slave whored out to a general,
a Persian wife under Roman rule, a once wealthy girl,
or perhaps goddess choked and drowned by the Turks.

Now archaeologists bore holes into the soil
of mosaics of children born thousands of years ago,
to awaken the ardor of Greek men for boys
long run cold. What was once great, now lies
beneath the world, as young boys once lay
under Greek men of old. The civilised ancients
fucking the new world, while the modern one
carefully excavates their bed sheets or
maniacally tries to wash them clean. Ancient
ancestors and enemies, one straddles, the other bends
over and so on goes history, in soil unseen.